WWDC 2026 roundup

Posted 15th July 2026 in Apple

I signed off on last year’s WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) roundup post wishing for a year focused on refinement, and it looks like that has finally happened!

Liquid Glass

2024 was all about AI, which fell short of what was promised. In 2025, Apple seemed keen to divert attention from its AI troubles, shifting the focus from AI to UI with Liquid Glass. The redesign felt rushed, especially on the Mac. Well, with macOS 27, it’s looking a lot better.

  • Corner radiuses on windows are sharper, like they used to be, and therefore more usable
  • Icons in menus are more selectively used, instead of being added to every single item
  • App toolbars are bars again; not buttons and button groups that float over content
  • App sidebars touch the edge again, leaving more space for content
  • Colour has been reintroduced to the items in app sidebars

A massive Mac-specific improvement

The headline feature for me is that you can now capture system audio when doing a screen recording. I do a fair amount of screen recording, and haven’t been able to capture VoiceOver’s audio without using third-party software.

Parental controls

This is another big one. I have two kids, and the last four or five years have been a constant cat-and-mouse struggle to keep my eldest’s screen time under control.

The interface has been hard to understand and hard to use, and there were subtle bugs which made me question my understanding of the fundamentals.

This redesign will hopefully fix all of that, making my life easier, and allowing my daughter to understand exactly where her boundaries lie.

Features-wise, there are a couple that look great:

  • Website approval requests, just like you can with apps, where previously the process was to add a website to an ‘allowed’ list and hope it worked
  • A pause button to pause device use

Siri app

Looks like Apple have sherlocked ChatGPT’s free plan!

Notes

I love Notes. I use it for all sorts of things, from taking meeting notes to scribbling down recipes. Super easy to use and really powerful when you dig in. Two new features will make it feel pretty much feature-complete:

  • Copy/paste as Markdown; currently, it does a reasonable job with lists, but from September it’ll do headings and links, and everything else
  • Section links; links to headings within the same note can now be added, meaning long documents don’t have to be broken up into several notes just to allow for, say, a table of contents

Photos

Like most people, I make heavy use of my camera. So a few features that are coming to Photos look cool:

  • Save a video frame as a photo
  • Photo Reframing, where AI can extend a photo’s background and move the camera angle
  • iCloud Shared Albums are now open to non-Apple users, which is great because every year we go on a family holiday and one person has an Android phone so we haven’t been able to use iCloud Shared Albums to share photos

Mail and Messages

Apple are promising better search in Mail. They made the same promise a couple of years ago, but it was still rubbish. Hopefully this year they get it right!

Suggestions in Messages look really useful. My wife and I share a Shopping list in Reminders, and this will be a super convenient way to add something to it via one of our regular “Can you grab some milk while you’re at the shop?”-style messages.

Apple Watch

Not too much here, but I’ve read about better battery efficiency. This would be good for me as I have a 42mm Series 10, which gives me about a day of full use. Problem is, I use it for sleep monitoring, so when I forget to charge it throughout the day I often find myself having to take it off before it runs out.

The Dynamic App Grid looks interesting too. I’ve never liked the app grid, but the alternative list view is very long.

CarPlay

Again, outside of the core Mac/iPhone/iPad ecosystem, there’s not a huge amount, but I often find myself in the car wanting to skip an annoying part of a song. Pressing the ‘current time’ marker and dragging along the timeline currently does nothing, which always catches me out. With this next version of CarPlay, that audio scrubbing feature will work as expected.

None of these changes is revolutionary, but together they add up to exactly the kind of thoughtful refinement I was hoping for. I haven’t felt this excited about an operating system update in a long time.

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More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

  1. There’s no going back

    The more I learn about accessibility, the harder it is to look back at some of my old work; but that cringe is a useful measure of progress.

  2. Clickable table rows are a bad idea

    Whole table rows might feel like obvious candidates to be clickable areas, but making them interactive creates real accessibility problems.